Lockdown Diversity and Protecting Staff Well-Being

The world of work and the world of home life are colliding. How can we maintain a diverse workplace and ensure staff well-being?

It’s true that Covid-19 has changed everything for us. From the loss of the commute to the addition of the extended workday, we are seeing massive shifts in how we do business. Everyone from the restaurateur to the high school teacher is having to re-evaluate how they get their service or product to the customers that need it most.

On the flip side of the same coin, hiring and firing is still taking place. Those of us who can still work, who are deemed as essential or who work in the digital (home) office anyway, are all still at it. We are still trying to recruit new staff amidst all of this – when we can’t even conduct face-to-face interviews or receive paper CVs.

How to Protect Staff Wellbeing in Covid-19 times?

As a result of all the above, managers across the UK, the US, and Europe, are turning to new ways to ensure staff are feeling mentally healthy, despite living in and working from the same place.

The Tedium of Working from Home

First, we need to identify the risk factors involved in staff working from home. The remote worker is at increased risk of isolation and loneliness, both of which lead to depression and subsequently time spent off work.

Conversely, we ought to examine how it is for your employees to remain in work now. With everything else going on in their lives, the responsibility of home schooling, the inability to partake in any of their previous escapes, and all of this on top of full-time work? You can see how some employees will be at breaking point.

Lockdown Diversity: Ensuring a versatile workforce even in a WFH world

So, how do we go about ensuring staff have the same, equality-based playing field when it comes to working from home during a pandemic as they had before? We need to up our own investment in the people we choose to join our teams. How? It starts with Hays Thrive for Businesses aimed at precisely that and able to be completed from home. This allows each member of your team the same knowledge on equality, diversity, and well-being.

Next, we must do face-to-face check ins via video chat. Try and get to each of your employees once a week. The reasoning behind this has its background in the research done into remote workers, pre-Covid. Decreasing that isolation by running group meetings to check in can also have a great impact on remote employee mental health… not to mention that this method is establishing an evolution of office culture.

Moving Forward

We need to make sure that the workforce we are hiring and firing now is treated with nothing but the upmost respect. Regardless of whether we are making money or not, at the end of all of this, the people will remember those that treated their staff well before they will remember those that didn’t. Keep an eye out for one another. It should be the minimum we can do for ourselves right now.